On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urbanek@r-project.org
> wrote:

> Copyright is the right that the author of an original work holds
> automatically (unless someone else can claim to own his work - e.g. his
> employer etc.) under the Berne Convention. The copyright gives only the
> author all rights - including but not limited to the right to copy, modify,
> distribute the work etc.  Licenses are used to give some of those rights to
> other people under certain conditions. Hence you cannot "assign yourself
> copyright" because you already have it (and if you don't then your cannot
> assign it). Also you don't need to give the "copyright" to anyone else - you
> can give certain rights to others using licenses -- such as GPL, LGPL, EUPL
> etc. -- but you don't give copyright by those since you have far more rights
> as the author (e.g., you can do whatever your want with the original work
> beyond the restrictions of the license). There are cases where you may want
> to give your copyright to someone, e.g., an organization that represents all
> authors of a project which makes it easier to change licenses etc., but that
> is a different story.


Interesting, but what about the situation where a new author adds his name
as copyright holder without the
consent of the original copyright holder, and with only one person making
the decision whether or not this
change is warranted: the new copyright holder? Doesn't this amount to giving
the copyright away, or
giving it away to everybody?

GPL is often called copyleft for a reason: it basically cancels most of the
rights that you would have with
an ordinary copyright so that others can freely copy your work with no
requirements other than that your
copyright notice be retained, along with a potentially unlimited number of
other "copyright" notices attached
to the same work. (For completeness, there is a clause about not leaving
misleading impressions about
previous authors, but in my opinion the only way this could be enforced is
if the contributions of the
previous author are not altered. But this is inconsistent with the broad
freedoms granted by the main
text of the license.)

The only "infringement" cases that I am aware of is where a company is sued
because it tried to turn
GPL software into a commercial product. This is what GPL was designed to do.
It is not designed
to protect authors (because that would be an attack on software freedom and
apple pie, according to
true believers).

Dominick

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